Interestingly enough in Nebraska Apple is fighting against the right to repair law because it covers electronics too
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/apple-tells-lawma...
The thriving black market of John Deere tractor hacking
61–70 of 185 posts
Re: The thriving black market of John Deere tractor hacking
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
My dad is a mechanical engineer who loves cars. I spent my youth listening to him lamenting the fact that modern cara have too many electronics and DIY protections. That you can't even make an oil change without also notifying the computer, the interface for which is proprietary and only sold to licensed dealers, or the car would refuse to run because it would think its oil is bad. He reminisced about the good old da…
[citation needed] There is no vehicle on the market (that I know of) which will refuse to run without an oil change. On my 17 year old BMW and 2 year old VW, the oil service indicator is just a reminder, a courtesy. On the BMW I can reset it with a paper clip. On the VW I can reset it on the screen on the dash. Honestly, most of the major things that go wrong with cars these days are still mechanical, and are still f…
On my Smart the service reminder is similarly easy to reset. All i need to do is press and hold two buttons that are too far apart to be pressed by one hand while turning on the ignition on the center console.
I usually do it by pressing the indicator with my feet and turning the key by hand.
Re: The thriving black market of John Deere tractor hacking
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
You haven't experienced it, but this sort of thing does exist. Want to replace your relatively simple Volvo throttle body with a junkyard pull? Nope, it's programmed to your VIN. Similar for many radios. And the notoriously glitchy matrix display on the dash cluster of 90s BMW's. Also, PCM and body control modules, and more I've forgotten.
Tying elements like radios to VINs is actually a result of extremely rampant theft in 90s and early 00s, and I would never consider it a bad thing. Annoying, yes, but it has eventually led to dramatic decrease in car break-ins and theft over the last 10 years.
Maybe theft decreased because radios were becoming worthless due to their mainstream installation into all cars ?
Re: The thriving black market of John Deere tractor hacking
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure about the laws in the US, but my wife works as a chemical engineer at a sewage treatment plant here in Sweden and they run _all_ incoming sewage through a aneorobic digester. This generates enough methane to run all the busses in Stockholm and then some. Our car also (VW Passat) also runs on bio-methane. Important to note that this is 100% carbon-neutral since it uses carbon already in cycle, as opposed to f…
Is it true methane is so much worse a geeenhouse gas than co2 ("20x")? Wouldn't that mean him turning methane into co2 is not just carbon neutral, but great for the environment?
In theory. There is probably a lot of greenhouse emissions that goes into feeding the pigs though, like with most vegetable farming.
Re: The thriving black market of John Deere tractor hacking
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is it true methane is so much worse a geeenhouse gas than co2 ("20x")? Wouldn't that mean him turning methane into co2 is not just carbon neutral, but great for the environment? It's true and it actually has a GWP[0] of ~80 over 20 years (so over 20 years a given mass of methane traps 80 times as much heat as the same mass of CO2), although it degrades back to CO2 and water in 12 years. So yes if you're releasing t…
From what I understood, they were using methane in internal combustion engines, so they are not releasing methane into atmosphere, rather burning it and producing CO2. I would assume that some of the methane is going to end up in atmosphere (engine efficiency, leaking from gas tank), but compare that to untreated pig manure, which would produce said methane anyhow.
Well, we're probably talking about industrial-scale pig farming here. So yes, the carbon in that manure would otherwise likely end up as atmospheric methane. If you applied it sparingly to the soil, much of the carbon would get incorporated into humus. But large pig farms don't have enough land, so they spread thick, and you get methane.
Another issue is that most of the carbon in that manure comes from feed corn. And most of the energy in feed corn comes from ammonia fertilizer, which is made from fossil methane. But hey, it's still a win compared to field spreading.
Right.
Re: The thriving black market of John Deere tractor hacking
#66> Kluthe, for example, uses pig manure to power his tractor, which requires engine modifications that would likely violate John Deere's terms of service on newer machines. > "I take the hog waste and run it through an anaerobic digester and I've learned to compress the methane," he said. "I run an 80 percent methane in my Chevy Diesel Pickup and I run 90 percent methane in my tractor. And they both purr. I take a lot…
Great point. This isn't like biodiesel or ethanol, where the co2 would end up in the air anyway. A methane generator actively creates a carbon form that is significantly worse for the environment.
Ethanol is a bad counterexample. Most ethanol comes from corn, and most energy in corn comes from fossil methane, used to synthesize ammonia fertilizer.
Re: The thriving black market of John Deere tractor hacking
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it true methane is so much worse a geeenhouse gas than co2 ("20x")? Wouldn't that mean him turning methane into co2 is not just carbon neutral, but great for the environment?
In theory. There is probably a lot of greenhouse emissions that goes into feeding the pigs though, like with most vegetable farming.
The discussion is only about the "outflow". The assumption is that you're releasing a set amount of carbon, but you can release it either as methane or as CO2 (and extract some energy out of it in the process).
Re: The thriving black market of John Deere tractor hacking
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it true methane is so much worse a geeenhouse gas than co2 ("20x")? Wouldn't that mean him turning methane into co2 is not just carbon neutral, but great for the environment?
> Wouldn't that mean him turning methane into co2 is not just carbon neutral, but great for the environment? Yes, though if you use the aneorobic digester to make the methane in the first place, it's moot.
That's only if the original pile of manure would not release the methane on its own.
Re: The thriving black market of John Deere tractor hacking
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Methane burns cleaner than petrol.
how are its lubrication properties?
It doesn't lubricate; also gasoline or alcohol doesn't do much there. 4-stroke engines have oil chamber to do it. Nitrogen emissions from the burning process tend to contaminate the oil a bit but overall, CNG and bi-fuel cars are a long-established technology (e.g. I rode in many taxis running on gas in China around the year 2000).
Re: The thriving black market of John Deere tractor hacking
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great point. This isn't like biodiesel or ethanol, where the co2 would end up in the air anyway. A methane generator actively creates a carbon form that is significantly worse for the environment.
No. This process is 100% carbon neutral. It recycles the carbon already in the pig manure as opposed to natural gas which is a fossil fuel and adds to the carbon cycle.
Plus locally produced and consumed, so you're not using diesel trucks/ships to move it over long distances (compared to powering his tractor using diesel or gasoline or whatever tractors normally use).